Don’t get us wrong: the full-length movie is still a verifiable pants-pooper. Imagine: You and your twin brother live in the Austrian/Czech countryside, which is beautiful but so remote that even the sweet summer breezes are creepy. Then, your mom leaves you there, in your big, empty house, completely alone. Then, she comes home, but her face is covered in bandages, her eyes all bloodshot. Then, you wonder, what if this isn’t really my mom, just someone pretending to be my mom? Scary, indeed.

The difference between the trailer and the movie, though? In the film, you get a resolution. Yes, that resolution is certifiably fucked. up. But at least you get one. The trailer version instead gives you all the makings of a nightmare—cockroaches, masks, fires, mirrors—but without ever getting to the part where you wake up. Clay Skipper

The scariest thing about Robert Eggers' The Witch is that nothing is a metaphor; the goat in the yard actually is Satan, and the titular witch is not a figment of a colonial town’s nightmares—she’s a scary crone who lives in the forest. The Witch is more like spooky folklore than horror, validating Puritan fears about evil. But there’s an eeriness that lingers long after the movie’s over, and you won't even jump out of your seat. Unless you are, in fact, a Puritan. Lauren Larson

Photo: Mary Evans/ Ronald Grant/ Everett Collection

The scariest part of this 2014 Australian horror film isn’t the monster. It’s the feeling that the shadowy monster might actually be real....

I wanted the audience to feel like they had a pair of hands wrapped
gently around their neck that they couldn’t shake, and that grip kept
getting tighter and tighter until they couldn’t breathe. And then an
explosion of everything crushing down on them. Suspense has more to do
with musicality and the rhythm that music contains. (Carpenter films
influenced me so much.) I wanted to be relentless and not let up on
the audience. Jennifer Kent, Writer/Director

BONUS! John Carpenter on spooky sounds:

"I composed my own music because we didn’t have any money to hire
anyone. When I wrote the theme from Halloween, it was a rhythm my
dad taught me on bongos. I just walked it up an octave on piano, then
it modulates. There’s no more to it than that. It’s repetitive.
Repetitive stuff makes you tense."

Photo: IFC Midnight/ Everett Collection

What makes Freaks (1932) frightening at a more primitive level than other horror flicks is its cast: The deformed circus performers who act out their revenge on a beautiful but callous trapeze artist (Olga Baclanova) were real sideshow attractions, from "Half Boy" Johnny Eckwhose miniature body ended at the waistto Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. We know they’re being exploited for sensationalism’s sake, but that’s how they earned a living in those rubbernecking times; in its opportunistic, semi-documentary way, Tod Browning’s film preserved a carny subculture that nobody belonged to by choice. The frequently crude filmmaking, artless dialogue, and tinny soundtrack augment the queasy effect, but there’s nothing inept about the movie’s showpiece sequences: the "wedding feast" that celebrates Baclanova’s gruesome marriage to a dapper dwarf (future _Wizard of Oz _Lollipop Guild Member Harry Earles) and the terrifying climax, when the freaks stalk their prey in a rainstorm. If _Freaks _doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies, not much will. ****Tom Carson

Photo: Everett Collection

What Could Possibly Scare The Creator Of The Human Centipede?

Well, to me, films like Sleepless in
Seattle are extreme
horror. The sugary ending with Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, and the little kid
on the rooftop of the Empire State Building is nightmarish. Happy
endings only exist at Amsterdam massage parlors. Tom Six

Photo: MGM/Everett Collection

Poltergeist (1982) is lodged in the collective cultural memory as a kiddie-scare flick with an adorable catchphrase. But it’s actually a rare example of a fiendishly efficient all-ages horror movie, blending the stuff that frightens kids (thunderstorms, monsters in the closet, clown dolls) with the stuff that frightens mortgage-holders (children in peril, sudden collapses in property values, clown dolls). It’s effectively a war movie about a family defending itself against an uprising of lost souls, and part of its genius is that the battlefield isn’t, say, a creaky Gothic mansion or a haunted hotel complex in winter but a cookie-cutter suburban-California house where even the most mundane objectsthe TV set, chairs around the kitchen tablecan be recruited to the dark side. Jessica Winter

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Photo: 20th Century Fox/The Kobal Collection

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY SCARE O. J. SIMPSON?

You want to have fun while you’re being scared. Like a roller
coaster ride, your heart should be in your mouth but you need to be
strapped in tightly. The biggest Oh my God!-scary movie is Alien. I
watched it at an industry screening two rows behind O. J. Simpson.
That moment where the alien comes out of the guy’s stomach took me out
of my chair. I would’ve been embarrassed if Simpson hadn’t jumped much
higher and much faster. If it could scare the Juice, I was okay.
Sean Cunningham, Director, Friday The 13th

Photo: Warner Bros/ Everett Collection

The Blair Witch Project (1999) gave me nightmares for about a year. It still causes major problems in my personal relationship with Joshua Leonard, one of the movie’s stars. I have a hard time being around him whenever he’s facing a corner. Like, We can hang out; you just gotta stay in the middle of the fucking room, dude. That image was ingrained in my subconscious forever. The feeling behind the movie was very realistic. Something about the way the movie is shot, with the lo-fi camera, gave a bit of intimacy to it all. It was just unique and unsettling. There was no thinking; it was mostly just urinating. Mark Duplass, Actor/Filmmaker

Photo: Everett Collection

Holy crap, The Exorcist (1973). I was 14 when I saw it, permanently scarred for life. Thereafter, for many years, I wouldn’t, couldn’t, be left alone in a room at night. My bad dreams revolved around scenes in the movie, of green puke and the voice of Beelzebub, saying really really inappropriate stuff. If I became feverish, I was pretty sure it was Pazuzuthe evil spirit who inhabits Linda Blaircome to mess me up. And Ouija boards? Forget it! But the real horror is the horrible realization that darkness may really win out over good, that our universe is bursting at the seams with violence and entropy. It’s the horror of a really sweet, loving, decent kidjust like all of us, for fuck’s sake!suddenly turned against her mother and a bunch of priests, even, with such rabid malevolence that there seems no justice in the world. It’s the horror of possession and the proximity of chaos and a glimmer of that unconscious force that might unravel all of us. The Exorcist is a game of chicken for our souls, and you know from early on, that someone’s gonna end up dead. You just keeping hoping it won’t be you. Michael Paterniti

Photo: Stanley Bielecki Movie Collection/Getty Images

Easily the most traumatizing aspect of The Omen (1976) is what it sounds like. It’s a noisy film replete with bloodcurdling screamsbut what really gets under your skin is the cacophony of dog attacks, baboon creeches, and sheer ghoulishness of happy kids shrieking and then going silent for the ropy recoil of a noose. Zero suspension of disbelief required. It was to me entirely plausible that Lucifer’s son was a podgy English boy in a spread-collar, bell-bottom pile-fabric suit, and a kid being diabolical scared me as a non-practicing baby Catholic. I was trapped in the catch-22 of believing in hell just enough to think that doubting it all would send me there. Mary H.K. Choi

Photo: Mary Evans/ Ronald Grant/ Everett Collection

I showed Who Can Kill a Child? (a.k.a. Island of the Damned; 1976) to Quentin Tarantino, and he said it was the best horror movie that he hadn’t seen before. It’s like a Hitchcock moviebrilliant and so simple. A guy and his pregnant wife go on vacation to this island off the coast of Spain; they get there, and the adults are gone. Just very, very creepy kids. They realize that something infected the kids and they all went crazy, killed the adults. So he’s got to defend himself, but how do you kill a 3-year-old kid? Like, you can’t. It’s your instinct to protect children, but these are amazing killer kids. There’s a scene where they’re trapped in a jail cell, and they look up, and there’s a 3-year-old, and he’s got a gun and starts pointing it at the couple in the jail cell. And the kid’s just smiling. Totally nuts. Eli Roth, Writer/Director, Hostel, Cabin Fever

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Photo: Everett Collection

The films that have really scared me give me the feeling that whoever made it is dangerous and crazy. Like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). I really, literally, thought that was made by a Manson Family-like group in Texas somewhere. As a filmmaker, you have to cross those lines, as I did in my first couple of films to the point where people spurned my company. The audience has to feel like the director is dangerous: He crossed lines he shouldn’t cross, and he might put anything up on the screen. Wes Craven, Filmmaker, Scream series, A Nightmare On Elm Street, The Last House On The Left

David Lynch taps into something unexplainable. Like the scene in Mulholland Dr. where two people meet up in a diner in the middle of the day and one of the guys describes his dreams to the other guy. It’s one of the scariest scenes ever committed to film, but it shouldn’t be. Nothing about that scene should be scary at all. Lynch is able to tap into something that’s scary for human beings: fear of the unknown. A big clich about Lynch is that his films are dreamlike, but it’s true. Dreams follow weird logic. Lynch’s films are like that: feels like a nightmare. Leigh Whannell, Writer, Saw and Insidious series

Photo: Everett Collection

In 1974, with the bad half of a marijuana cigarette in me, I experienced this film on Hollywood Boulevard that just rocks my world: Sisters (1973) plays on the fear of Siamese twins. The Brian De Palma film stars Margot Kidder, in French-Canadian lushness. And there’s a phenomenal mad doctor played by William Finley. He’s like a giant sweating grasshopper. It’s just an incredible performance; he literally cuts the Siamese twins in half so that he can fuck one of them. That’s what he’s after. I would love to see it correctly projected, although I’m sure there’s a Blu-ray out. It would look great on a fifty-inch flat-screen with curvature in the goddamn man cave.** Robert Englund, Actor (Freddy Krueger)**

Photo: Universal/The Kobal Collection

I jumped up and ran screaming to the back of the theater but eventually sat back down, because I was fascinated. Horrified, but fascinated. I saw It Came from Outer Space (1953) in 3-D, which was not a good thing for a young kid. A meteor (we find out later it’s a spaceship) streaks across the desert night sky. Cut to an angle where the burning ball of fire comes hurtling straight into the camera and explodes. I didn’t understand anything. Why is this meteor blowing up in my face? Horror works best when you’re young, when we have these imaginations that are still very active. As you get older, your knowledge of your own limits, and of death, sometimes takes away from horror’s appeal. John Carpenter, Creator, Halloween

Photo: Universal/The Kobal Collection

The reason I made Young Frankenstein was because when I was 5 or 6 years old, I was scared out of my wits by James Whale’s Frankenstein. I could not get images of Boris Karloff’s face out of my head. I would see him in every alley and around every dark corner. One very hot night in July, I asked my mother to close my bedroom window. In Brooklyn in 1931, there was no such thing as air-conditioning. I explained that Frankenstein (that is what we mistakenly called The Monster) was out to get me! And since my bedroom window was on the fire escape, it would be easy for him to climb up and crush me like a bug. My mother patiently explained that he would have to crawl out of his burning cellar in Transylvania and find the money to buy a railway ticket to get a train to take him to Hamburg. He would then have to raise the money to buy a boat ticket to get from Hamburg to New York City. When he landed in New York, he would have to find the right subway train to take him to Brooklyn. He would have to ask a lot of people to find out where I lived, and she was sure nobody would tell him. I said, "Okay, leave the window open!" And that’s why I’m alive today. Mel Brooks

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Photo: Universal/The Kobal Collection

I remember really being scared by, of all movies, Halloween III: Season of the Witch , which has a horrible subplot about a deranged mask manufacturer, Silver Shamrock, who, for some reason, on a Halloween has designed these masks that you can pick up at any drugstore. They bombard the United States with advertisements about buying these masks for your kids: Wear ’em on Halloween! But this guy has put in chipsthis is so absurd I can’t even explain itwhich I think he got from Stonehenge. On Halloween night, these chips get activated and fill kids’ heads with beetles, crickets, and snakes, and your entire head becomes this pulsating mass with beetles and crickets and snakes. The first time I saw it in a theater I said, "The most awful thing I’ve ever seen." Bret Easton Ellis, Author, American Psycho

Photo: Royal Films international / Neal Peters Collection

Repulsion is a psychological drama, but it’s the scariest movie I’ve ever seen. It’s about a woman’s descent into madness. It’s done quietly but creepily. She sees hands coming out of the wall and a guy breaking into her room. It gets under your skin. Roman Polanski knows the buttons to push. You feel like you’re going crazy yourself. George Romero, Director, Night Of The Living Dead

I’ve had crazy blonde girlfriends, and this focuses on the psychology behind a psychotic blonde who is, you know, repulsed by sex and by men, so she does the unthinkable. I married a brunette. Nick Carter, Singer, The Backstreet Boys

Photo: Mary Evans/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection

The Scariest Movie You Don’t Actually Want to Watch

It goes beyond any bounds of good taste: It’s so violent, so bloody, so nasty. The thing I remember the most is a scene where they kill a huge river turtle. No way is that entertaining in any way. You can see it’s real. They rip the shell off, you know, they kill it all on camera, and it’s just horrible. And then they move right from that to other people doing things that are obviously fake, but just as nasty and brutally violent. It’s the closest thing you’re going to get to watching a snuff film, other than actually watching a snuff film if they actually exist. So yeah, there’s the feel-bad movie of your fall: Cannibal Holocaust (1980). Rob Zombie, Writer/Director, House Of 1000 Corpses

Un Chien Andalou (1929): In the opening scene, a man holds a razor up to a woman’s eye. The camera cuts to a knife-shaped cloud passing in front of the moonthen, jarringly, back to the razor, which slices the woman’s eye open. Eye-guts spill out.

Misery (1990): Superfan Kathy Bates loves a novelist so much that she shoves a block of wood between his feet and smashes his ankles with a sledgehammer.

LEGS

Shaun of the Dead (2004): In a tribute scene to Day of the Dead, Simon Pegg’s priggish frenemy David gets dragged through a pub window and disemboweled by zombies. Pegg & Co. accidentally rip David’s legs off, trying to save him.

ENTIRE BODY

Videodrome (1983): James Woods, a hallucinating human VCR, guns down a sinister TV executive. His body convulses and splits open as a bunch of weird malevolent gunk bursts out of his head and torso. "Long live the new flesh!" cries Woods.

INTESTINES

Day of the Dead (1985): As the gang is making its escape from a military base, commander Rhodes gets cornered by good zombie Bub and ripped in half by a mob of regular zombies, who pass his intestines around like Vienna sausages.

JAW

The Fly (1986): Goldblum slowly metamorphoses into a slimy, demented, sex-crazed housefly. His jaw falls off. Then the rest of him.

TONGUE

Blood Feast (1963): The gore is explicit but ineptly done, which for some reason makes it all the more disturbing. See: the scene in which the lead cannibal rips out a woman’s tongue.

SCENE: A man is imprisoned in a massive vat while a conveyor belt drops dead pigs into a grinder and the resulting sludge belches out onto him. The idea, of course, is to drown our hapless anti-hero in a keg of porcine putrescence.

EFFLUVIUM: Poop

MOVIE: The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) 2011

SCENE: The victims of the ten-strong daisy chain each have bouts of explosive diarrhea in and on each other. If it gets grosser than this, we don’t want to know about it.

EFFLUVIUM: Bug bile

MOVIE:The Fly 1986

SCENE: As Seth Brundle gets deeper into his Kafka-esque transmogrification, he discovers the only way he can eat is to vomit copious amounts of acidic bile onto donuts and slurp up the stinking sauce. A revolting revelation that gets even nastier when he opts to blow this caustic goop onto the squirming limbs of living people.

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EFFLUVIUM: Vomit

MOVIE: City of the Living Dead 1980

SCENE: A young lady receives a whammy of a hex via a demonic dead Priest, cries streams of blood from her eyes, spittle froths from her lips, opens her mouth wide and vomits out her entire intestinal tract.

EFFLUVIUM: Blood

MOVIE: Andy Warhol’s Dracula 1974

SCENE: The only way Dracula can survive is if he sips virgin bloodin one scene, a murdered virgin’s blood is rescued for the Count by sopping it up off the ground with a fresh loaf of Italian bread.

EFFLUVIUM: Rotting rotten things

MOVIE: Phenomena 1984

SCENE: Nothing, NOTHING, tops the climax in which our leading lady falls into a noxious pit of putrefying bodies, maggots, and liquid filth, struggling to stay afloat, screaming bloody murder, while wrecked human heads and other rotting parts bump up against her.

EFFLUVIUM: Semen

MOVIE: Ichi the Killer 2001

SCENE: Takashi Miike’s daft yakuza meltdown is ripe with outrageous, operatic levels of ultraviolence and depravity and yet nothing quite tops its opening credits sequence, in which the title treatment rises from a dripping puddle of jizz.

The campaign for You’re Next: Ads for films like The Big Wedding are superimposed with faint images of a You’re Next masked murderer. The effect: panic that he’s behind you. These, along with posters for Saw and Hostel, are the brainchild of Lionsgate’s chief marketing officer, Tim Palen. Here, his scariest-poster picks.

The Conjuring (2013)

"There’s a shadow on the ground of a body hanging that isn’t actually hanging from the noose. You might not ever see that. That was such a smart, brave thing to do. I can imagine sitting in a room and saying, ’Here’s the poster, and the most scary part of it you might not ever see. It’s just for us. It’ll be our little secret.’"

The Exorcist (1973)

"That silhouette of the exorcist under the streetlighta beautiful, simple, kind of innocuous image for a really terrifying movie. Your imagination fills in the blanks."

Photo:Everett Collection

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

"So iconographic and smart and spooky at the same time. It just didn’t look like a horror movie. Beautiful and haunting."

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